Together with Executive Coach, Dennis Heath,  he will facilitate a debrief a video of masterful coaching by Meta Coach Michelle Duval.

If you are in Singapore and want to see how masterful coaches, build rapport, ask questions, probe for meaning, and co-create new behaviours and reinforce resourceful thoughts and actions, then come along. Details here.

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In 1984 the number of internet devices was 1000, in 1992, 1,000,000 and in 2008, 1000,000,000!

To reach an audience of 50 million it took Radio 38 years, Tv 13 years, iPod 3 years and Facebook 2 years!

In 2007 there were 2.7 Billion Google queries/month in 2008 31 Billion! Who did we ask those questions BG (before  Google)?

And the internet is changing our lives in other ways; in 2007 one in eight couples who married in the USA met on the internet!

It is so easy to take the internet for granted and Gen Y have never lived without it – and people ask the question , “what’s next?”

The other question is, “what remains the same?”

People still need to exercise self leadership, they still need to communicate effectively and influence others; they still need to learn, grow and find meaning and happiness in what they do. Thankfully the internet helps us to find the resources to do these things.

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Since the 1970s, futurists have been telling us that the world is changing, that the change itself is changing, and that the changing change is also accelerating.  And much of this change is how the world is getting smaller.  When I first read Alvin Tofler in the 1970s (Future Shock), it seemed like science fiction, but no longer.  The predictions that life on this planet would one day be like a village, a global village—that day seems to have arrived.  Thomas L. Friedman calls this “the flattening of the world” in The World is Flat (2005).  In that book he identifies ten “flatteners” beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall to the introduction of Windows to open-sourcing, outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing, and so on.

The world is not only smaller, it is faster.  News today occurs on thousands of cable and internet channels—24/7 / 360 days of the year.  News today travels around the world not merely in hours or even minutes, but in seconds.  In moments, information about political crisis, armed invasions, tsunamias, earthquakes, Britany Spears, the price of oil, a suicide bomb explosion, etc. can be in our email inboxes and on hundreds of news programs.  So today we have the “soft” science of economics is governed by other “soft” sciences (psychology, linguistics, wealth, etc.) that is now influenced and affected by more and more variables.  And that means the world is becoming more and more systemic.

As a soft science, economics is influenced as much by beliefs, frames-of-mind, representations, interpretations, emotions, values, states and meta-states as it is by anything tangible like houses or mortgages.  What is the value of a house?  Above and beyond the materials that go into the construction and its cost, the supply of houses, the demand for them, the value depends on what people think, how much they want them, how much sellers think they can ask for, etc.  It depends on fallible human states and meta-states.  That’s why they can be so over-valued that they can mess up the economy.

Similarly with the human decision to lend money to a buyer for a mortgage.  It depends on the criteria they set for determining who they can trust to be dependable in repaying the loan.  And once a mortgage company creates a subprime loan for people with no or little down payment, who don’t have the financial resources, but who believe that the value of the house will increase at such a rate that it will have, say $100,000 equity in 12 months, and then someone sells these high return loans to Wall Street who then offers them on a world market … then people can believe and feel confident about returns, and borrow more money on the assumed value of the increased and increasing equity and somewhere along the line we all move to La-La land assuming that if we believe it or think it, it will happen.

Then reality hits.  The balloon payment on the loan comes due and people begin to default on their loans.  This lowers the confident feelings of others about the loans, which is communicated by the sensational bad-news “News” organizations thereby creating more fear and worry about the home mortgage market, then a negative spiral begins and suddenly market value drops around the world.  And the nature of the world— smaller, faster, and more systemic is amplifying all of this.

There’s now one more quality.  It is more psychological. Did you notice the number of states and meta-states in these descriptions?  How many did you notice?  We call all of this economics, yet it is actually psycho-economics. The psycho- part is the role of people’s assumptions and interpretations of value or dis-value, their emotional states of confidence or fear, of optimism or apprehensiveness and how these states play such a critical role in economics.

Apparently the banking industry has lost a trillion dollars worth of value and the US Congress has voted to spend more than a trillion dollars to deal with it.  A trillion dollars!  How much is that?  On one program someone said that if you had a trillion dollars in one dollar bills, it would be 67.8 miles tall (over 100 kilometers).  Or if you went out on a spending spree — and you could spend a million dollars a day (a million!!) — and you started today, it would take you more than 2,000 years to spend it.

Okay, so if the economy or the banks lost a trillion dollars, where did all of that money go?  Who got it?  The weird thing is that much of it didn’t go anywhere.  Much of it existed on paper as a record of the way people were thinking, expecting, valuing, feeling confident or worried, etc.  One day people made certain evaluations about their trust and confidence in certain homes, businesses, markets, and futures and presto— there was a trillion dollars of value.  At a later time, they lost confidence—and a trillion dollars of value disappeared.

What is this downturn about?  Perhaps it is just a market correction, perhaps it is another aspect of the flattening of the world, perhaps it is a call to recognize the role of our meta-states in creating our social realities.  Whatever it is, it is a call to your resilience, state management, and ability to know that your highest asset is your ability to add value.

I think it is also a call for a belief in responsible abundance.  That is, if our psycho-economics play such a crucial role in all of this, we now have to resist the temptation to play into the hands of the negative press.  It is the psychology of the press to sensationalize whatever they can and turn facts into negative catastrophes.  After all, if in the small, fast, systemic, and psychological world—our beliefs, fears, worries, hopes, optimism, resilience (and many other states and meta-states) are now key factors determining whether we set in motion a negative downward spiraling or an upward positive spiraling —then we have to be more responsible to fear-mongering, fear-spreading, negative-forecasting and more committed to intelligent optimism that fosters resilience, persistence, and hope.

What’s needed is an army of people committed to actualizing their own potentials and those of others.  What’s needed is a community of people who believe in an abundance of possibilities and potentials—if people are given a chance.  What’s needed are a global village of people who will resist the negatively-oriented media and do their part to unleash more and more possibilities.

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“We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: if you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren’t managing their employees’ careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.”  –

Self Development is intrinsic to self-leadership as leadership and learning are inseparable. So as Drucker says, we must take responsibility for our own growth and success – we must be the CEO of our own mind and body.

Self Development includes, developing healthy self esteem, self knowledge, self image, self belief and self confidence so that you can develop your unique talents and abilities and contribute.

Through Self development and self leadership we can find meaning and significance in our lives, attain states of self efficacy (Bandura), flow (Csikszentmihalyi) and self actualisation (Maslow).

• Self-efficacy is the belief that you are capable of performing in a certain way to attain your goals It is the belief that you have the capabilities to execute the courses of actions required to manage prospective situations. Self-efficacy is the opposite of helplessness (Seligman) it means you are the captain of your ship and you can set a course and navigate obstacles to reach your desired destination and win the prize.
• Flow is that mental state in which you are fully immersed in what you are doing doing; you experience  feelings of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. You experience flow states when you challenge your abilities with an appropriate task, so that time goes away and you are fully in the moment. Surprisingly we find we are happiest when we are full engaged by work rather that slacking off and resting.
• Self actualisation is the desire to become everything that you arecapable of becoming and to find meaning in what you do. Self actualisation is the big “Why” question, it answers why you are here and why you are doing what you do.

Some organisations view self development in human capital but in the current financial climate it is more likely that your self development is up to you.

What are you doing about your self development?

• Are you regularly reading books or blogs that enrich your mind?
• Are you associating with people that challenge your thinking?
• Are you attending seminars or webinars that expand your perspective?
• Are you spending time in quiet reflection and evaluating what’s important to you and your community?

At Self Leadership International we include self development and positive psychology in all our programmes, in addition we teach certification programmes in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), NeuroSemantics and Coaching.

• NLP is essentially a model of learning and demonstrates that we can model human thinking, behaviour and communication.
• Neuro-Semantics is about translating great ideas into reality, about performing our highest meanings, about enriching our performances with the most compelling intentions, and getting to the heart of things via communication.
• Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them. Clients say that coaching brings out their best by helping them focus, break down tasks and clarify their values.

Through these technologies you can learn to lead your mind and body to create the results you want in your life.

To your highest and best!

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Well, if the answer is yes to any of the two questions, you have probably fallen in the same trap so many people fall every day…the trap of Procrastination!

But how bad is it to procrastinate anyways?

Well, The Procrastination Research Group (so it even has its own research group!) made a survey on 2,700 individuals and asked them how much negative impact does procrastination have on their happiness? 46% said that very much and 18% said that an extreme negative effect.

Pretty bad, don’t you think?

So let’s explore what are the most common reasons of procrastination:

• Care Too Much About What Others Think

It happens that sometimes you want to impress others so much that when given a task you feel so much pressure that it delays your work.

• Striving For The Perfect

It sounds weird, but perfectionism can be what causes procrastination. You may want to strive for perfectionism so much that you feel disheartened even before you begin. This is because a goal that seems unachievable (and who can ever be perfect, anyway?) can be demoralizing.

• Doing Things Totally New To You

You need to embark on a totally new project and you have no idea at all on how to tackle it. The first reaction is to procrastinate. The uncertainty of the result of this task causes you to delay commencing the project.

• The Task Isn’t Meaningful And Motivating

This is another main reason what causes procrastination. The task at hand isn’t motivating to you, as it does not match your aspiration. It is not meaningful to you and therefore you drag your feet in completing the task.

• The Lack Of Confidence

Another common cause of procrastination is the lack of confidence in completing a task. It can be real that you lack the skills but sometimes it may be a perception that you lack the skill. Because of this you may totally avoid completing the task.

OK, but enough with the causes, here are seven solutions:

1. Give up being Perfect! (Nobody is and nobody will ever be!) It is much better to do a task 80% good, rather than wait until you are 100% satisfied and never actually manage to deliver it.
2. Just as most people can’t eat a whole birthday cake in one bite, some jobs cannot be done all at once. Some people come to realize that it is harder to put something off if they slice a job up into manageable pieces and do the task piece by piece, little by little. This might mean breaking down the time required to-do a task into smaller chunks that are spaced over several days or weeks. Some people don’t like large doses of something distasteful. They find that smaller doses spaced over time makes things easier to do and less procrastinatable.
3. Another way some people have reduced procrastination is to begin with an easy, an enjoyable, or the least distasteful piece of a job to get started.
4. Many ex-procrastinators have realized that working with someone else makes it less likely that they will put something off. Perhaps this would work for you.
5. It could be that you will come to realize that making a commitment to someone or setting a deadline for completing a task is one way to make procrastination more difficult. It is known that for many people, setting a goal results in motivation. For this to work, ex-procrastinators have found that the goal must be something they want to achieve.
6. Maybe you will discover that doing a job in the least distracting environment makes putting off work a little harder. For many college students, homes, dorm rooms, or apartments have many distractions and potential distractions. Perhaps you will find a place like the library to study where it is quiet and is going to stay quiet until you are ready to leave.
7. Like many non-procrastinators, you may find it enjoyable to reward yourself for doing a part of a job and for completing a task. Some examples of rewards are treating yourself to some delicious fruits, going to a movie, visiting with friends, or just doing something that you enjoy.

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An important realisation when working in a team is that the way you perceive and respond to the world (your personality) is NOT the “Right Way” or “The Only Way” to do things. This realisation reduces our frustration and opens us to the possibility of collaboration rather than compromise.

The team work cycle highlights the need for different personalities. Some people are better at generating ideas, some at evaluating ideas, some at making decisions and others at execution (implementation). If everyone on the team were the same, then some parts of the team work cycle would be left out.

Most team issues are due to a lack of effective communication resulting in people becoming aggressive creating conflict or becoming passive and de-motivated. The key self-leadership skill for team members is therefore ‘assertive communication.’

Communication occurs when those involve have shared meaning and understanding. Since we don’t know what something means to someone unless we ask, communication involves asking questions and getting clarification. It also means speaking up (assertive) so that others know your meanings and understandings about what and how things should be done.

Assertive team communication has been made more complex in the virtual world where we don’t have non-verbal cues and we have to factor in cultural differences in speech styles and meanings.

In my experience, what remains a constant for high performing teams is that the following things are communicated and understood by all.

1. Vision - How this work/project is important to the company and the team members.
2. Group Identity – That we are all on the same team and all benefit from the success of the work.
3. Role Clarity – That we each have a role to play and that role is clearly defined.
4. Trust - We are all different but we can trust each other to do the work to the best of our abilities.
5. Recognition - Each of us will do our best for the team and appreciate others for doing the same.
6. Communication - We will both listen to others and speak up as appropriate so that everyone shares an understanding of what is possible at each stage of the work cycle.
7. Celebration - We will celebrate together with each milestone we reach.

How does your team measure up? What can you do to make sure these things are communicated?

Have a good day at work :0

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How often do you hear someone say, “I love my job?”

Our career coach, Jass Malaney says, this is rare.

Conversations at work are more likely to be along the lines of, “Thank God it’s Friday” or “When my lottery numbers come up I’m out of here”.

Confucius said, “Man who loves what he does, never does a day’s work in his life”.

Is it possible to love your Job? Do you know someone who does?

People who love their jobs rather than just turning up for the pay check, are engaged by it and gain meaning from it.

Research by the Gallup Organisation has identified that employees need the following to feel engaged by their work:

• Role clarity: Employees know what is expected of them at work.
• Talent utilisation: Workers have opportunities to use their talents in their roles every day.
• Recognition: Employees receive recognition regularly and feel cared for.
• Communication: Workers receive ongoing feedback on their performance and have regularly scheduled progress discussions.
• Bonding: Employees have strong bonds with their coworkers.
• Development: Employees have opportunities to learn and grow.

You might consider these factors to be the responsibility of your manager or your organisation to provide. It is true that organisations that value their employees and managers who understand people leadership will have these factors in mind; however you do have a self leadership responsibility for your own engagement.

Psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied thousands of people and discovered that we bounce between two extremes: during much of the day we live filled with the anxiety and pressures of our work and obligations, while during our leisure moments, we tend to live in passive boredom. The key to happiness is therefore to challenge ourselves with tasks requiring a high degree of skill and commitment and to become fully engaged in these activities.

When we are fully engaged in an activity we enter into a state of ‘flow’, a state where time goes away and the task seems effortless. We tend to experience such ‘flow’ moments when playing a sport or engaged in a hobby. Imagine skiing down a mountain with all of your attention focused on making the turns, you are unlikely at this moment to be worrying about trivial issues. Another aspect of a flow moment is that feedback is immediate; the mountain climber knows he or she is one step closer to the goal.

So how do you create more flow moments in your job?

1. Constantly find challenges that will stretch your skill level, especially if it requires learning something new.
2. Set goals and request feedback that lets you know how you are doing in the short rather than long-term.
3. Find meaning in what you do

Meaning
A craftsman knows why he does what he does. The industrial revolution, with its soulless assembly lines, robbed many workers with the sense of meaning for what they do. Victor Frankl, who survived a Nazi concentration camp, suggested that we can stand any “what” if we have a big enough “why”. Find the meaning in what you do; what does your work mean to you? To others? To the world?

For example a teacher might find meaning in that they get to share what they have learned and the more they teach the more they know about the subject. Their teaching impacts a generation of students and those students will change the world, even if only a little bit at a time.

To find meaning at work, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What does this work mean to me?
2. What does it mean to my clients, customers?
3. What does this work mean in the context of my life?
4. How can I give this work more meaning?

When we combine meaning with our actions we become self-actualised, our life has purpose and passion and we can truly love our work.

Often when we think of someone who loves their job we think that they are engaged in a vocation rather than work (think doctors and nurses).

Aristotle said, “Where talents and the needs of the world cross, therein lies your vocation.” Today we might use the word passion rather than vocation.

The needs of the world are not just for excellent health care, but also for excellent customer service, sales people, accountants, technicians, builders etc. etc. etc.

Sometimes we think we will be happiest sitting on a beach doing nothing (passive boredom), but in truth we are happiest when we are doing something useful.

So do you love your job? Feel free to comment.

Andrew

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I have defined Self leadership as having a developed sense of who you are, what you can do, where you are going coupled with the ability to manage your communication,  emotions and behaviour on the way to getting there.

Self leadership equates to the leadership competencies of Self Awareness and Self Management but most importantly Self-leadership impacts all aspect of  your life, your health, your career and your relationships.

Listen to Self leadership podcastFor Self leadership to occur we have met our survival needs of food and shelter and begin to look for meaning in our lives. The first skill of self leadership is to STOP and STEP BACK from the things that trigger us to react; because when we react we are being controlled by the trigger. The second skill is to consider our INTENTION. Intention is what is important to us, our values and what we are trying to achieve. By being intentional we can start to live a life of choice.

The above diagram can serve as simple illustration of the points of leverage for developing our self leadership. Intention precedes any behaviour (action). Actions have effects which we evaluate via feedback. A difference between the expected outcome (intention) and the feedback causes us to feel emotions. The meanings we make of these emotions can reinforce, reduce or distort our intentions.

To make sense of this in your own life, consider something you are trying to achieve right now such as getting healthy, increasing your wealth or developing a relationship.

Start with translating your intentions into appropriate actions.

• What is it you want to achieve?
• What actions do you need to take to achieve this?

Once action has been taken it is necessary to be receptive to the feedback that the world will give in response to your action/s. The quality of the feedback is essential – the sooner you receive it, the sooner you can make adjustments. Beware your conditioned filters that might cause you to interpret feedback as criticism or to be selective about what you take notice of.

• What are the results of your actions?
• Is this feedback accurate?
• Am I filtering the feedback?

The feedback we receive causes us sensations/emotions from which we make meaning.

• What am I feeling?
• What does this mean?
• What else could this mean?

By asking these self coaching questions you pave the way for a rapid feedback loop that will enable you to make the adjustments required in your communication/behaviour to achieve your outcome. If problems arise start first by checking your intention, then your behaviour, then the feedback and finally your emotions.

(This blog is copyright Andrew Bryant. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

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